Posted on 04/11/2002 1:58:22 PM PDT by quimby
The war that Arafat called forth (FOUAD AJAMI)
BY FOUAD AJAMI
We have come to the inevitable conclusion that the peace of Oslo that plucked Yasser Arafat from his exile in Tunisia nearly a decade ago and brought him to the Palestinian territories is now a thing of the past.
From the moment he arrived up till last week's Passover massacre in Netanya, the Palestinian leader aided, abetted, and led the forces of radicalism and terror. He operated on the blissful assumption that the other Arabs and powers beyond would come to the rescue, spare him the logic of his own deeds, deem him the best of a bad lot of alternatives. The "siege of Ramallah" that Arafat courted and rendered inevitable is not, save in his mind, a replay of 1982's Lebanon war.
Nor is it a mere recasting of that war's two antagonists, Arafat and his nemesis, Ariel Sharon.
No sovereign government could tolerate the current season of killing that Arafat unleashed on Israel. He has waged his cynical and brutal war with a cunning sense of Israel's scruples and restraint and its sensitivity to international norms and pressures. If this new cycle of warfare pits Sharon against Arafat, this is exactly the kind of war and the adversary that Arafat called forth. With brutal efficiency, it was his launching of the war in September 2000–upon his return from Camp David and his spurning of the peace offered him by Ehud Barak, Israel's soldier-statesman, and a solicitous Bill Clinton–that resurrected Sharon's political career.
Arafat broke Barak. The waves of suicide "martyrs" sent a bewildered Israeli nation in search of a leader who would deliver it from merciless terror. Over 18 months, Arafat came to present Israel with a sadistic challenge: With indiscriminate terror his instrument of war, he set out to wreck the nation's peace of mind, taunt its liberal culture, and destroy its modern economy.
Targeting the soul. The logic behind Arafat's ruthless method is easily seen. In the cold calculus, the balance of casualties now runs 3 to 1–in 18 months, 1,200 Palestinians have been killed for 370 Israelis. In the first intifada, which erupted in 1987 when Arafat was still away from the land, the ratio had been 25 to 1. The lieutenant who sat in for him at the Beirut summit, Farouk Qaddumi, cut to the heart of the matter. This second intifada is working, he said, because Israel "lost stability and security; psychological problems spread, and unemployment and emigration rose." Arafat aims at Israel's soul–to wear it down, to rob it of the sense of normalcy that has been its impossible dream since the beginning of its statehood.
As a gambler and adventurer averse to the normal work of nations, Arafat made peace with Israel only to break it. He had broken with the Arab world only to return to the Arab councils of power and to take up an old, failed history. He was unloved and distrusted by other Arabs. There was loathing of him in Beirut, a city he had set on fire for more than a decade, and contempt for him in Kuwait for his betrayal of the Kuwaitis in 1990's hour of need. But Arafat hoped that there would be uses for him and a new lease on life. This second intifada is his "gift" to the other Arabs: a macabre celebration of the "martyrs," a diversion from the verdict on the Arab condition rendered by the "boys of September 11" who gave the world a cruel illustration of the furies on the loose in Arab lands.
It was true to Arafat's way and to his history that he would try to hold America's campaign against terror hostage to his war against Israel. America is unloved in Arab lands, this argument runs, and its campaign can proceed only if Palestinian claims are satisfied. But this argument is supreme illusion. America indeed is unloved. In truth, the hatred for it is bottomless. Even if we cast Israel adrift, Arab opinion will cut us no slack.
In modern times, the Palestinians have been singularly unlucky in their choice of leaders. When statehood was first offered the Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s, their leader was a terrible man, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti (religious judge) of Jerusalem. He abandoned reason, moved to Hitler's Berlin, and hoped the Nazis would grant him a political world. In the 1960s, another Palestinian leader, a braggart by the name of Ahmad Shuqairi, was sure that Israel would be sacked and its people would flee or be put to the sword.
Arafat is of a piece with that history. The young Palestinian men and women, cruel and betrayed at the same time, who embrace death and destruction and spread it in their wake, would have had a different history had the man in the Ramallah compound been made of different stuff.
Some will never accept the above statement, no matter how many times the lesson is repeated.
"I've never before seen so much cleverness, blood, and filth altogether in one man."
Yes, Arafat's hosts shook his hands, but Pacepa reports they could hardly wait to repair to the lavatory!
Finally. The gig is up.
It is NOT a war against Islam, as some have called for.
It is a war against a particular brand of Arab Fascism that shamelessly perverts Islam.
The US is not hated for its association with Israel; Israel is hated for its association with the US.
I think you got that backwards. Although it's true that if not for the US-there would be no Israel.
Irony of ironies - Arafag is the nephew of the mufti of Jerusalem. Arafag continues the work that his uncle started: that evil SOB not only moved to Berlin, but he gave Hitler advice to kill all the Jews in Europe, instead of Hitler's previous preference to deport them. This was before the Wannsee Conference, so it may have played a role in Hitler's decision. I'm surprised that Fouad didn't mention it. Otherwise, this is his usual hard-hitting and accurate report on things as they really are in the Arab world.
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Agreed, it will never end. Although I wouldn't mind giving them Jersey City...that would show them.
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